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Wednesday, September 1, 2010

The first mate’s
father writes a regular column for his local newspaper. It’s called, “Jay Speaks!” In this guest installment of the
SlowBoat blog, Jay speaks about the family’s “boating history,” and relates
what it was like to cruise with the Cap’n and crew last week.

Jay and Kitty Berger and Dragonfly in Palmyra NY

Within minutes after the Capt’n docked the boat at a marina
in Waukegan, Illinois, the little rubber dinghies started circling, and we could hear the tramp of
feet as other boaters flocked down the wooden docks to get a closer
look.

The questions came fast and furious. “Did you bring that
barge here from Europe?” “Is that
an English narrowboat?” “How many amps do you get out of your solar panels?” “How fast can you go?” “Can you run all day on solar power?” “Did
you build it yourself?” “How old
is it?” and . . . “May we come
aboard and look around?”

Dragonfly has
certainly attracted a lot of attention so far on this Great Loop adventure.
Being on the boat last week made us reminisce about how the Berger family got
involved in boating.

We’d started going camping for our family vacations, and when the
first mate was about six years old, we looked around for a canoe to take
along. A little old lady sold us a
magnificent, 18-foot-long, antique canvas-and-wood canoe that dated back to 1906 for a tiny sum;
her late husband had courted her in it, and she wanted it to “go to a good
home.”

This canoe took our family on many adventures around New
England, Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. When the first mate went off to college,
she took it with her. (Some kids
take cars to college; she took an antique canoe . . . hmmm, even then, interested in alternative transportation.)

A few years later, I won a (very) small sailboat. We used it mostly on a (very) small man-made
lake near from our home.

After the kids left home for college, Kitty and I tried a
few more forms of boating: A sailing adventure through the Caribbean, and a
rafting trip down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. We also took a few conventional
cruises on big ships. And that was
the sum of our boating experience. For quite a while, our travels were landlocked.

Then, last summer, Cynthia and Bill told us they were taking
Bill’s parents for a trip on the Erie Canal in a canal boat. That sounded like
a good summer boating vacation. Next
thing we knew, they had bought that very boat! And the next thing we knew, it was this past May, and we
were travelling the Erie ourselves, on the Dragonfly’s
“shakedown cruise,” before she left to travel the Great Loop.

When we boarded the Dragonfly
on that spring day, at its home port in Macedon, New York, I was impressed. I’d
seen pictures, but the boat was much more than I expected. I was especially
taken with the solar panels. (In my hometown of Agawam, Massachusetts, I’m the
energy commissioner, responsible for green energy initiatives.)

Although we’d travelled through the gigantic locks on the Panama
Canal in a cruise ship, it was a completely different experience locking
through smaller locks in a smaller boat, where the crew had to scamper about on
the narrow gunwhales,
holding the tie-up ropes. Meanwhile,
Mother Nature threw everything in her arsenal at us: rain, sleet, snow, hail,
gale-force winds. We also stayed
overnight in a haunted mansion. It
was definitely adventurous!

Ever since the Dragonfly
departed on June 1st, we’ve been following the blog, to see if we
could predict the approximate date the boat would arrive in Chicago (our son
lives not too far from there.) Finally, we made our airline reservations . . .
and a few weeks later, there we were, north of Chicago, ready for another adventure . . . once again cruising on
the Dragonfly.

We boarded the boat in Winthrop Harbor on a sunny morning,
and made the trip to down to Waukegan entirely on solar power—no fossil fuel
needed! The day was spectacular. Blue skies, bright sun, small white clouds, sailboats
dancing on the waves around us. The boat rocked just enough to make it
interesting. We looked for landmarks along the shoreline, noting the Great
Lakes Naval Training Station and a few power plants. And then, there we were in Waukegan, famously the home of
Jack Benny.

The Cap’n radioed the harbormaster, got a slip assignment, and
manipulated the throttle and tiller until the 14-ton boat gently nudged the wooden dock. (He looked like he’d been doing it his
entire life.) And then the
gawkers, the onlookers, and the just-plain-curious started gathering round . . . .

Gee, I thought, the crew of the Dragonfly only have to do this for another forty-five hundred
miles. We’ll have to catch up with them in Florida and see how they’re doing.